Photo: WARNING !!please gain correct permission to use from Dean Chalkley (dean@deanchalkley.com and V2 recordings) any unauthorised usage will be prosecuted!
this image can be used for press purposes only any other usage must be renegotiated in advance of use the failure to follow this directive will result in legal action.

Image 1of/4

Caption

Close

Image 1 of 4

Josh Ritter

Josh Ritter

Photo: WARNING !!please gain correct permission to use from Dean Chalkley (dean@deanchalkley.com and V2 recordings) any unauthorised usage will be prosecuted!
this image can be used for press purposes only any other usage must be renegotiated in advance of use the failure to follow this directive will result in legal action.

The last time Josh Ritter performed in the Capital Region — the first time, too; it was his local debut — he earned this headline in the Times Union: "Ritter simply spectacular."

It was February 2007 when he played at The Egg, just him and his guitar. Now Ritter, 33, is returning to perform Saturday at the Troy Savings Bank Music Hall. He comes still being hailed as the new Dylan — at the close of what he describes as an amazing year.

He spoke to the Times Union Nov. 20 while waiting in an airport.

Q: What do you have in store this time?

A: I'm bringing my band, which is the guys I've been playing with now for almost 10 years. They're just masters, and they're pretty telepathic. They cover up most of my mistakes.

I'm expecting it to be just a great time. I haven't played too much in the Northeast recently, and I've had just an amazing year. I've recorded a new record. I got married — married someone from Kentucky who's also a musician. She's awesome. Her name is Dawn Landes, and she's an amazing songwriter.

I finished a rough draft of a book that I'm really excited about. I feel really happy right now, really fulfilled. I want to go out and play and have a really good end of the year.

Q: Do you have an opening band?

A: Yes, a great, great, great band called the Low Anthem. They're a real up-and-coming band. And I think they just play beautifully. I'm proud to be associated with them.

Q: Two days ago you were playing in Los Angeles, opening for the Swell Season. Where are you today?

A: I'm in the Burbank airport, trying to get the hell out of here. And tomorrow I'm going to be doing a benefit show for a friend of mine in my home town. Then I'm off around the country.

Q: It's a benefit for Jim LaFortune, a teacher at Moscow Junior High in Moscow, Idaho, right?

A: Yeah, he's one of my first really influential teachers. He's pretty ill [with brain cancer]. ... It just felt like a really good thing to do, and I was really excited to help. I find it pretty unconscionable that somebody who's been a teacher for 30 years, done everything right and has benefits is still facing a pretty difficult thing and going deeply into debt.

Q: So he was a teacher of yours?

A: He was a science teacher of mine. And my parents are both scientists. He was one of those teachers who told you, "You know, whatever you do, as long as you love it … " So he's been very important to me.

Q: You've recorded your next album?

A: It's coming out in April of 2010. I've worked on it for about a year now in between touring. I just got it done the other day. I'm over the moon to have it done and start thinking about playing it with all the guys and kind of showing off.

Q: Is the album different from your last one?

A: Yeah, it's pretty different. The last record I did really quickly. It was kind of impressionistic. I wanted it to be kind of like a Jackson Pollock painting. This record, I kind of built it much slower. It ended up feeling to me more like an old Italian master, you know, one of those big 60-foot canvases, you know, big oil, big Caravaggio painting. It's very ornate and orchestral. I'm very excited how it sounds.

Q: How many albums do you have?

A: This new one will be my sixth studio album. And then I have a couple of live albums and EPs and things like that. I think EPs are sort of like progress reports. They point where you're going to go when you start doing a record.

Q: And you're writing a novel?

A: I just finished the big first draft, so I'm working on the big, big first edit.

Q: Is it about music?

A: No it's not. In fact, there's no music in it. I didn't really think about it until the other night when I was about to fall asleep. ... Which is cool, because I don't think about music all the time. It's not my main focus. It's words, just words.

Q: You're very literate. How much credit for your song-writing do you give to your reading?

A: For most songwriters I know, it's really important. I love Philip Roth. I love Mark Twain, Muriel Spark and Pete Dexter and, oh, there are so many people I love. I love Flannery O'Connor. She's a really big influence on my record. I think her stories are great. She just burns down doll houses, one by one, you know; nobody escapes. And I love that. I get a lot of inspiration from writers.

Q: Does it help your vocabulary, your story-telling, your creativity?

A: I think what it does is, I start to appreciate what they're doing ... that there can be an intent there that you didn't realize ... and also that little things can add up to big things. Muriel Spark writes these very slight novels. They're a lot like songs. Her characters are defined by just tiny little actions. And they're the kind of actions you can fit into a song. It doesn't take 200 pages to establish their motive. You know right away whether they're greedy, or whether they're malicious, or naive, or happy. I really like that sort of thing.

Q: What are you reading at the moment?

A: I'm actually reading this book by Haruki Murakami called "What I Talk About When I Talk About Running." It's a book about running and writing. It's a really pretty book. And I'm going to see "Macbeth" in a few days in Boston, so I've got that, just so I can bone up and not get totally lost. And I have something else, but I can't remember what it is. It's in my bag.

Q: Do you ever get grief from your band mates for reading on the tour bus?

A: It's funny. We all read quite a bit. I don't think there's a book I've ever read that Zack my bass player hasn't read before me. And Liam my drummer is a huge reader as well. I get a lot of books from him.

For me, the real key is to read whatever kind of drifts across the way — not to be too selective. You're not limiting yourself, and it's just more fun. I read a book by Neal Stephenson recently called "Cryptonomicon." It's not a book that I ever would have read otherwise, but Liam passed it on to me. And I had a great time reading it. I learned a lot of interesting things about the invention of the computer, and who knows, you throw that together with something else, and you come up with something really wild you can write about.

Q: You have a very literary band …

A: It's a pretty nerdy tour bus.

Q: What are you listening to at the moment?

A: I'm listening to a lot of Every Brothers. I think it's because I finished this record, and my brain went kind of blank for a little while, and now I'm just listening to the Everly Brothers. I think they're just amazing. I always liked them, but it really hit me the other day just how simple and sweet — that teenage love thing where the world is ending, and there's no future. And it's so dramatic and sweet. Them and Buddy Holly … just that sweet, sad sort of song. I'm really loving it right now.

Q: You've been compared to Dylan and Springsteen. Is that a good thing, a bad thing, something you never think about?

A: I don't think about it in any other way than, you know, we do similar things. Dylan and Springsteen, they're not just individuals. They're kind of historical things. It's more than just a person. It's like an idea now, you know? So I feel like, really, that sort of thing is only built over a lifetime.

I have people that I've always looked up to for different reasons. I really respect the way that Springsteen has kind of had his career and seemingly had a normal life at the same time and really seemed to weather the sort of craziness of that lifestyle and still make great records.

Dylan, whenever I get to a point of not being able to write something, I think of a line from his song "Brownsville Girl," where he says, "If there's an original thought out there, I could use it right now." I always love that, because I feel like he's somebody I can look up to when I'm having trouble writing, and I can think, "Well, there's other people better than me who have had that same problem."

Q: Speaking of a normal life, you're in an airport now, are people recognizing you?

A: Yeah, sometimes. When it happens, it's a cool thing. I definitely don't want their impression of me to be that they met me, and I was a jerk. You know, I think that stuff's incredible. And also, whether I like it or not, that's part of the whole game. It would be like complaining about record labels. It's part of it. I really happen to enjoy meeting people, after shows or whatever.

Q: Your parents are neuroscientists. You went to Oberlin College to study neuroscience. How did you end up with a career in music?

A: I didn't know anything else. I thought that was the only thing. I guess if both my parents had been jockeys, I would have thought that was the life for me, too. It's funny, thinking back I just didn't have any idea that there were other careers.

When I went to school I was looking at all these different people who seemed to have minds that were just as free and creative as any scientist. It took me a while to realize that I wanted to play music, but I could relate to my parents because of their love of what they did, not for necessarily the thing that they did. They really love what they do, and that makes them good at what they do.

It was a long process to decide that I wasn't going to do science, but in the end it was much less painful than it would have been if I'd actually tried to do science, because I would have been really mediocre and probably wouldn't have enjoyed myself very much. I feel that way about a lot of people that I see: Did you really want to become an anesthesiologist? Was that your dream? Maybe it was. But like, it's worth it. It's just worth it to do what you like.

Q: Was there a lot of music in your home?

A: Not a lot, no. My brother and I both played the violin, you know, kind of took lessons, and it was very tortured. We didn't have a lot of radio stations. It was all pretty mainstream. We had kind of the Alan Jackson filter. If it didn't have Alan Jackson it in, you know, country music didn't play it.

Q: Was it in college, then, that you got into music?

A: Violin playing aside, I think I really discovered music when I heard Bob Dylan and Johnny Cash on my parents' record player. They didn't have very many records, but the ones they did have ... just blew my mind. I remember listening to "Nashville Skyline" one day when I was about 17. It was a feeling I'd never had before. It was like a new language. It made me feel like I could express myself. It was like a door opening. I really think that day was the day that changed everything for me. I bought a guitar the next day at K-Mart.

Q: You recorded your first album in a studio on campus when you were 21. What happened after that?

Q: After I graduated I went to Providence and started going up to Boston and playing open mics every night. That's how I started meeting people. I started playing shows and splitting shows with people. And then a guy whose band the Frames later became the Swell Season invited me over to Ireland, and I started playing over there.

There was no big break or anything. You just kind of play and play and play — and play and play. There's never been a moment when it felt like the world is my oyster. But it's always just progressed.

Q: Do you feel more like the world is your oyster now?

A: I feel like I've got a lot more opportunities to try some stuff I really like. I feel like I have a lot more options about how I put out my records, how I record them, who I record them with. All that stuff is much more possible — envision it, and you can usual make it happen.

A: If someone's reading this, learning about you for the first time, but they're interested in listening to your music, where do you suggest they start?

A: The album I would start with probably would be "The Animal Years." It goes in both directions from there. On the one side it's more simple, rootsy stuff, and on the other side it's kind of where I feel I'm at now, which is a larger, freer sort of sound.

["The Animal Years"] was kind of the beginning of experimenting with the sonics of things and with song structure. Yeah, that's the one I would start with.

Tom Keyser can be reached at 454-5448 or by e-mail at tkeyser@timesunion.com.